Going mobile has been a massive push for Spotify's music-streaming service, as exclusively revealed to TechRadar earlier this year, while a US launch isn't that far off. It's not being outrageous to suggest that taking Spotify onto mobile is make or break for the company.

You'll need a Spotify Premium account to use the iPhone app, which may seem draconian, but someone needs to pay for all this stuff. So that's 99p per day, £10 a month or £120 a year.

Like the Last.fm app, Spotify for iPhone also means you can listen to music over-the-air via Wi-Fi or 3G but naturally Spotify's ability to search and stream any track in its library is absolutely key. The Radio function isn't present in the Spotify iPhone app like it is on the desktop, while there's also no Play Queue or way to save previous searches.

Unlike the iPod app that can run in the background, Spotify on iPhone suffers the same problem that Last.fm has - it's only single-tasking and so when you're listening to tunes, the rest of your iPhone is dead to you.

Despite the early stage of the software, the Spotify app is fast and responsive and, like the desktop software, streams tracks within seconds.

So let's get on with it. Spotify on iPhone. As soon as we logged into the app, we were presented with a list of playlists – there are three main tabs, Playlists, Search and More and we'll separate our hands-on into those three areas.